"Signal just come through, sir," the signalman announced with a smile on his face. "Rapier will proceed to Portsmouth at daylight to-morrow to refit. She will not be required for patrol to-night."
The ship was long overdue for the dockyard, but the skipper and
Pettigrew looked at each other, hardly able to believe their ears.
"Lord!" muttered the former. "That means a week's leave, Sub. D'you realise that?"
"Do I not, sir!" answered the Sub-Lieutenant, as the signalman retired with a grin.
THE TRADERS
We were steaming to the westward, towards the spot where the sun, glowing like a disc of molten copper, was slowly nearing the horizon. It had been one of those hot, breathless sort of days with no breeze; and now, near sunset, nothing but an occasional cat's-paw stole gently across the sea to ruffle its glassy surface in irregular-shaped patches. Elsewhere, the water, shining like a mirror, reflected the blazing glory of the sky.
Some distance off lay the coast, its familiar outline dim, purple, and mysterious in the evening mist. But it was neither the sunset, glorious as it was, nor the scenery which held our imagination. It was the shipping.
All manner of craft there were. First came the Spurt, of Tromsö, a Norwegian tramp of dissolute and chastened appearance, whose deliberate, plodding gait and general air of senility belied her name, or at any rate the English meaning of it. Her rusty black hull was decorated with three large squares painted in her national colours, red, with a vertical white-edged stripe of blue in the centre. Next a bulbous, prosperous-looking Dutchman, who seemed to waddle in her, or his, stride. She was slightly faster than the ancient Spurt, but was no flyer, and boasted a canary-yellow hull bearing her name in fifteen-foot letters, and enormous painted tricolours striped horizontally in red, white, and blue.
Then two Swedes with unpronounceable names who, by their embellishments, informed the world that they hailed respectively from Göteborg and Helsingborg. They also sported large rectangles, painted in vertical stripes of yellow and blue, while close behind them, a Dane, with an absurdly attenuated funnel and long ventilators sticking at all angles out of her hull like pins from a pincushion, ambled stolidly along like a weary cart-horse. She, scorning other decoration, merely showed the scarlet white-crossed emblem of her country. Some of the neutrals carried signs bearing their names which could be illuminated at night, and all seemed equally determined not to afford any prowling Hun submarine a legitimate excuse for torpedoing them on sight.
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